When a music teacher that I had at school was taken ill and we had a variety show and I had to fill in - that's when I realized I had a voice.
I studied voice when I was at school, and I was in the chamber choir, and I studied music theory as well, so I guess a lot of it came from being taught at school.
I can only speak for myself and my own music, because that is what I am most familiar with, and I write about things that I am living or experiencing.
We used to play music for fun. Much more than now. Now nobody picks up a guitar unless they're paid for it.
To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!
I dropped out of NYU, moved out of my parent's house, got my own place, and survived on my own. I made music and worked my way from the bottom up.
I think what made it difficult for people to get, and still makes it difficult for people to get, is the theatrical nature of the work and the fact that, my music doesn't exist without the performance-art element.
I have to detach myself completely from aspirations. I hardly ever listen to music anymore because it arouses all of this yearning in me.
I think I'm sort of blind to genre. As long as it has a sort of honesty about it, which I think you'll hear in whatever music you respond to, then I think it doesn't need to be called anything particularly.
I don't think of myself as a folk singer per se, but I really like blues and string-band music. When I started listening to records when I was a teenager, the folk boom was going on.
I defied the machinery to make me its slave. Its incessant discords could not drown the music of my thoughts if I would let them fly high enough.
When I have a chunk of time that I can really dedicate to music, I really want to get into it. I want to do some really hard stuff and push myself.
No, I think that a person writes a poem because they have an inner urge of something that they want to express, and I think it's that inner urge that you want to express when you write a piece of music.
Janis Joplin is definitely one of my biggest influences. She taught me how to feel music, and I don't think there's anyone like her that could bring such pain and emotion to a song.
It was very interesting in my world, because I grew up as a fan and I did not know that there was a thing called R&B, pop, country, classical - I just knew that I loved music.
I'd refer to myself as a feminist. I don't think my music is overtly rooted in feminism. I'm a teenager, and 95 percent of my friends are boys, and that's just the way I've always been.
Any species capable of producing, at this earliest, juvenile stage of its development... the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, cannot be all bad.
My personal tastes... I actually like quite a bit acoustic and more mellow kinds of things. I quite like American music, like The Fray, I'm a massive fan of them, and The Killers.
We just kind saw the images and knew the cliches, so to have the opportunity to go there and learn something about Russian music and about Russian people and to see things apart from being a tourist.
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For years I wrote in my basement. More recently I graduated to one floor above, an office with all my books and music and - ta da! - a window.
